I’ve got a metric tonne of scripts for dealing with AWS environments in Ruby that I’ve written over the last six years of working on IES, mostly to organise data and application deployments. I’ve been wanting to put a web interface over them – to make it easier for other people in my team to use them – for some time, and even to make an iOS app for it, but I also didn’t want to run a dedicated backend server for a back-office app that I would use maybe a couple of times a week.

AWS Lambda is the perfect solution for building a backend for backoffice-style apps. But the thought of rebuilding these scripts as Node or Python was too much. Looking forward to trying this out!

Overall, a solid introduction to the Cucumber testing tool, and BDD in general. About the only criticism I have of it is that it’s perhaps a little bit too Ruby focused – an example of working with an application or a database without leveraging Rails would have been nice.

I’ve long been interested in decent ways of expressing tests in a human-readable format. Not just any humans, but BAs and business reps in particular – the kind of people who will not be interested in slugging through piles of language syntax. I tried Fit sometime ago, and was impressed, but when I came back and revisited it recently, it looked a lot like the community had kind of faded away. Accordingly, I looked around at what else was available, and stumbled across RSpec Now, I want to test Java code, and RSpec is for Ruby (as the R kind of hints), but I was able to get this going under JRuby fairly easily. I couldn’t find any examples of other people doing that, so I thought I’d write it up.